Kraft Heinz: Condiments aisle flow adjacency analysis
Optimizing the aisle with Walmart Luminate Charter
After years of collecting research and insights in collaboration with suppliers, Walmart developed its adjacency flow strategy for the condiments aisle. All Walmart stores were to be set accordingly to best meet customer needs, but walking the stores revealed this strategy wasn’t always in place. Knowing this likely caused confusion for customers, the Walmart Merchant and Kraft Heinz Category Advisor had questions, like:
- How many stores are misaligned?
- How does this affect the customer?
- Why isn’t this set correctly?
- Is there a way to find out how broad this is?
The team needed a way to gain answers without combing through thousands of store floor plans—and that’s where Walmart Luminate Channel Performance Charter and Shopper Behavior came in.
The first step
The project kicked off with identifying stores that were executing the flow strategy. Modular Plan Metrics in Channel Performance helped the team find three key data points:
Modular Category Description:
Removed outliers from the analysis (like combination modulars, and stores in Puerto Rico)
Store Aisle Identifier:
Separated stores that had all condiments categories on the same aisle vs. split on multiple aisles
Store Section Identifier:
Grouped stores by flow type
The Store Section Identifier found only 32% of stores were executing the adjacency strategy correctly, and there were 35 different variations found in the condiments aisle across all stores.
Understanding impact
Now that the team had a grasp on the scale of the problem, they then used Shopper Behavior to compare stores aligned to the strategy to those that were not. They analyzed performance with these reports:
- Test & Control Evaluation: Determine percent uplift from stores aligned vs misaligned to the strategy
- Performance In Detail: Compare performance between aligned and misaligned stores to calculate impact
And then dug into customer behaviors with:
- Cross Shop (products): Understand any cross-shop differences between stores aligned vs misaligned
- Basket Analysis: Identify basket differences between stores aligned vs misaligned
Opportunity emerges
Combining results from the Test & Control Evaluation and Performance in Detail reports helped the Merchant and Category Advisor determine that properly aligned stores saw uplifts as high as 1.9% in some categories. Scaling these percentages across affected stores provided a significant potential dollar value from correctly aligning stores to the strategy. Their next moves:
- Share these findings with leadership and inform them it can be used to monitor aisle execution
- Increase communication with store level operators to increase compliance
This can help the team lead future discussions with leadership on how to make progress towards perfect execution of aisle flow, with the potential dollar opportunity for improving the customer experience acting as motivation. Explore the Kraft-Heinz case study to see how Walmart Luminate Charter helped optimized the aisle.
References:
Proprietary First-Party Data, Walmart Luminate 2023
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